Ads are micropayments that work. I don’t like them per se and run an ad blocker and PiHole, but the fact that others don’t allows me to micropay for a lot of content with my time.
When I read a 5 minute Medium article, I'm paying with 5 minutes of my time. If I decide to bail out 1 minute into the article, I have still lost 1 minute of my time.
The creator isn't getting any benefit from it, but I'm still paying.
Ads will at best waste my time/bandwidth/processing power and at worst compromise my privacy and/or convince me to make a bad financial decision.
I don't see why this mentality is wrong?